女人三部曲

小女孩哈瓦用手比划着小树棍投下的影子，着急地说：“等到影子没有的时候，我就要回家了。”她的小伙伴却并不明白这树影的含义。也许她自己也不明白，什么叫作，“今天开始你是个女人了……”。对于9岁的哈瓦来说，如果好好利用这央求来的“最后一个小时”才是问题。导演的镜头却有些残忍，这一个小时竟然就这样无所事事的虚度了过去，当她和小男孩你一口我一口吃着棒棒糖而高兴起来的时候，妈妈准时来到她身边，为她戴上面纱。“已经中午了。”只是一个小时的时间，如此清晰地标示出她生命的节点，从这里开始，一段人生结束，而另一段开始了……

三个不同人生阶段的女人，一个女人三个不同的人生阶段，怎样理解都可以。童年、青年、老年，每个阶段所处不同的角色让女人陷入不同的内心与外界撕扯之中。童年时期是环境与外界的启蒙，长者要求你干什么，你在不解或不愿意的前提下依旧会遵守与顺从，因为人格还没有健全与完善，更谈不上独立。

即将9岁的小女孩哈瓦被长辈禁止与男孩接触，要开始戴上黑色面纱，她不知道为什么要这样，但她知道她得听话。她得在中午12点之前回家，因为12点她刚好9岁，12点之前是她仅剩的自由时光。她在朋友屋外插入一根木棍，当木棍的影子消失便是正午12点。她在屋外，朋友在屋内，她买了棒棒糖与朋友你一口我一口的分享，这一对青梅竹马眼里满是纯真与浪漫，以及无奈。对哈瓦来说，她即将被自己的国家与文化禁锢，在还没有独立人格与独立思考的阶段被教化。

青年时期的女人阿和与一群带着黑色头巾的年轻女人们一起进行自行车比赛，她的家人们一个个骑马赶来阻止她的骑车行为，这在家人眼中是大逆不道，丈夫甚至会为此而离婚。但阿和依旧一言不发的坚定的向前骑行，不断加快速度试图摆脱家人们的纠缠。这是一个独立人格成型，拥有独立思考能力和自我意识的女人进行反抗与坚守的人生阶段，态度明确，但她最终还是被家人们拦了下来，一切似乎都在向更糟的境遇发展。

年迈的老太胡拉购买了大量商品对方在海滩等待运走，海边的小孩子们面对琳琅满目的货品新奇不已，这些东西对于他们来说太过奢侈，而疯狂购物的老太似乎在弥补曾经失去的自我和时光。如今年迈的她可以买任何自己想买的东西，可以做任何自己想做的事，但她也没有精力来享受这一切，享受独立的自我与生活，疯狂的报复性消费更显悲凉。

In the first story of the film, Hava is told that she will become a woman in an hour. In fact, “becoming” is a constant, chronic process that runs through a woman’s entire life, or else how come the following two stories of the trio? I regard this film as a representation of women’s oppression – the social, cultural and religious forces that violently shape women – but also that of women’s resistance.

The first story of Hava denaturalizes the process of becoming a woman, stressing the forcible intervention of religion and culture in that process. In the first few minutes of the film, the question strikes us how anyone can become a woman at such an exact moment, at noon, as with Hava, or at any specific hour. Then I realize that womanhood is not a natural state that someone grows into, nor a physiological stage that means something inherently different; womanhood is imposed on Hava, with the headscarf as a symbol. Just as the headscarf, womanhood comes abruptly to Hava’s life, depriving her of the freedom of childhood. A line is suddenly drawn between Hava and Hassen, who were both “children” just an hour before, but now Hava is a “woman” and everything has changed.

If the headscarf serves as a sign of womanhood, the scene where Hava takes it off in exchange for the toy fish is particularly telling of her inner world, but also foreshadows her future life. When Hava makes this exchange, which entails the removal of her headscarf, she goes back to the state of a carefree girl absorbed with toys. Moreover, she tries to let the toy fish float towards the deep waters, which carries her own hopes of freedom and a bright future. However, it’s high tide and the water flushes the fish back. In the end, only the boys sail for the future, and girls could only go home – Hava’s mother finally puts the headscarf back on Hava’s head and takes her away, making her a woman again. The shot of the black sail appears at the beginning and is repeated at the end of the story. With its black color and soft texture, the black sail speaks to the motif of the headscarf in a questioning way: why does the former belongs to the men while the latter belongs to the women? Why does the sail promise a future while the headscarf deprives one?

A final thought on the first story is about the scene at Hassen’s window. The shot-reverse-shot shows Hava and Hassen both behind the incarceration bars in each other’s point of view. It tries to suggest that the making of woman is never women’s own business; it influences men as well and shapes society.

As recurrent motifs, the sea, the beach, and the headscarf also continue into the later stories. Hava stays at the beach when the boys sail towards the deep sea; as if chasing back the freedom once lost, Ahoo is doing bicycle racing at the seaside. If the first story shows how culture and religion makes a woman, Ahoo’s story shows how the inequality of power between (broadly speaking) genders brutally curbs a woman’s possibilities in life. After four rounds of interceptions and coercions, Ahoo’s husband and male reletives finally take away her bicycle by force – from the increasingly distant perspective of the rival cyclist, we look back on Ahoo being encircled by two men on horses, shouting and screaming in vain.

The tension between the bicycle and the horse suggest a clash between the new and the old worlds, the former inevitably being caught among the powers of the latter, just as Ahoo being caught between the two horses. The wind blows into Ahoo’s headscarf, which almost drops at a certain point, but she clenches it between her teeth and doesn’t let it go. Perhaps religion has become an integral part of herself, and some of the gender roles have been internalized. Dialogue is sparse; most of the time there’s only the sound of breath and the noise of bicycles; alternatively, a kind of monotonous high-pitched sound and some stylized folk songs come with the dramatic moments, such as the approaching of the horses, or the ending scene. In my perspective, the monotonous sound highlights the moments of inner struggle, while the folk song, sung by a male, symbolizes the influence of patriarchy.

One of the elder men askes Ahoo: “Haven’t you got enough sunshine?” For the protagonist of the third story, Hoora, the answer is clearly “not enough,” for which reason she chooses to die in the sunshine. So near her death, is Hoora still “becoming a woman”? For me this final story is the most elusive one, conveying many contradictory messages. She finally “buys” her own freedom, but the story also tells us that the impossibility to buy a child is a regret; She takes a wedding dress with her till the end of her life, which might suggest a returning to family life (or, is she wedded to the sea, the freedom?), but the story also shows boys wearing make-up and the very wedding dress. And what does it mean that she insists on replacing the “naked teacup”?

It’s high tide in the first story, where freedom is taken away. Now it’s falling tide and Hoora finally sets sail, as the boys do, but she is just coming to her death. It questions whether women can gain and enjoy freedom in the world, where they are made to be shackled, where the making of a woman means the deprivation of her freedom.